Please Be Normal to Chappell Roan

As a person with extremely niche and weird taste in gay music (not to brag), I know intimately how destabilizing it can feel when one of your favorite indie LGBTQ+ artists hits the big time. Nobody wants to be the crank hollering about how they “listened to Towa Bird before she was cool,” but in such circumstances there’s a natural inclination to insist that you are not like the other weirdo groupies, but rather a founding member of the Artist You Like’s fan club, and should be accorded special privileges as a result.

On the heels of the plea for boundaries that pop singer Chappell Roan recently issued on Instagram, however, I feel I also need to urge my fellow queer pop stans to get it together. Read Roan’s full statement below:

For the past 10 years I’ve been going nonstop to build my project and it’s come to the point that I need to draw lines and set boundaries. I want to be an artist for a very very long time. I’ve been in too many nonconsensual physical and social interactions and I just need to lay it out and remind you, women don’t owe you shit. I chose this career path because I love music and art and honoring my inner child, I do not accept harassment of any kind because I chose this path, nor do I deserve it.

When I m on stage, when I’m performing, when I’m in drag, when I’m at a work event, when I’m doing press...I am at work. Any other circumstance,I am not in work mode. I am clocked out. I don’t agree with the notion that I owe a mutual exchange of energy, time, or attention to people I do not know, do not trust, or who creep me out—just because they’re expressing admiration.

Women do not owe you a reason why they don t want to be touched or talked to. This has nothing to do with the gratitude and love I feel for my community, for the people who respect my boundaries, and for the love I feel from every person who lifts me up and has stuck with me to help the project get to where it is now.

I am specifically talking about predatory behavior (disguised as “superfan” behavior) that has become normalized because of the way women who are well-known have been treated in the past. Please do not assume vou know a lot about someone’s life, personality, and boundaries because you are familiar with them or their work online.

If you’re still asking, “Well, if you didn’t want this to happen, then why did you choose a career where you knew you wouldn’t be comfortable with the outcome of success?”—understand this: | embrace the success of the project, the love I feel, and the gratitude I have. What I do not accept are creepy people, being touched, and being followed.

This situation is similar to the idea that if a woman wears a short skirt and gets harassed or catcalled, she shouldn’t have worn the short skirt in the first place. It is not the woman’s duty to suck it up and take it; it is the harasser’s duty to be a decent person, leave her alone, and respect that she can wear whatever she wants and still deserve peace in this world.

I want to love my life, be outside, giggle with my friends, go to the movie theater, feel safe, and do all the things every single person deserves to do. Please stop touching me. Please stop being weird to my family and friends. Please stop assuming things about me. There is always more to the story. l am scared and tired. And please—don t call me Kayleigh. I feel more love than I ever have in my life. I feel the most unsafe I have ever felt in my life.

There is a part of myself that I save just for my project and all of you. There is a part of myself that is just for me, and I don’t want that taken away from me. Thank you for reading this. I appreciate your understanding and support.

Yes, some degree of having your life upended comes with the territory of fame, but it’s upsetting that Roan even needed to compose and post such a should-be-basic ask. “Please stop touching me” and “Please stop being weird to my family and friends” are not things that anyone should have to spell out for their fandom, no matter how much clout they’ve amassed or how many tours they’ve sold out. Do we need another tragic Selena Quintanilla situation to remind the world what happens when celebrity obsession turns dangerous? (Sorry to get dark, but these are so often the stakes for famous women in the public eye, especially queer and/or trans women, working-class women, and women of color who often have less insulation from the public to protect them from harassment.)

Roan is hardly the only celebrity to deal with upsetting fan behavior of late; Mitski, Sophia Bush, and Reneé Rapp are among the other artists and actors who have had to spell out their boundaries recently. I can’t help but wonder (sorry, Carrie Bradshaw moment) if the enforced isolation of the COVID pandemic has played some role in dissolving the line between “fan” and “creep” and further eroding, well…manners among pop superfans who can’t seem to see the objects of their affections as actual human beings who deserve some measure of privacy and protection from outside interference. (Remember the terrifying scourge of people throwing things at concerts last year?)

Is it the case that many of us, in Beyoncé s words, “forgot how we act outside”? If so, it’s time to remember—because I really do not want to live in a world where Roan (or any other queer pop performer) no longer feels comfortable giving it her all for her fans.